Return to the Serpent Isle Is Now Ultima: Return!
After a few months of no news, Team Return have posted a news update to their revamped website, in which they announce that the project is changing titles. Return to the Serpent Isle is gone; the project is now known as Ultima: Return, which I would agree is a substantially better title.
The team has been through some shakeups since February, when we heard from them last:
I won’t lie and pretend everything went as smoothly as planned however: some areas are going better than other and while things have been progressing very well on the writing and coding front, worldbuilding has definitely been going slower and other domains like art have basically reached a stand still. This basically lead us to have to take some measure and reorganise the whole team – meaning we are now fewer that we used to, but nevertheless we are still are committed as ever to bring our project to you all even if it ends up taking more time than we’d hope.
In spite of these and other setbacks, though, they have announced their first release:
…it is time to officially announce our first upcoming release which is currently being dubbed: “Ultima: Return – Prologue”. This is not the Chapter 1 of Return, but a shorter module that we begun working on slightly over a year ago. Initially conceived as some form of tech demo in order to showcase our gameplay systems and allows us to gain more experience in crafting our game, it has gradually evolved into a short module of its own to basically learn our craft before starting the biggest chunk of the game and offer Ultima fans something to enjoy.
Be sure to check the Ultima: Return website for additional details about what Prologue will entail.
Very interesting stuff from what I see. A shame you are currently lacking in 3d talent. Recently, I’ve even been contemplating learning some 3d modeling for FW. If nothing else than to make sure that any model needs can be met, which is actually rather few if we take a more conservative approach to FW unlike in your situation.
I wish you guys the best of luck, and if I find any good free 3D model sites that might work for Ultima, I’ll let you know.
Character portraits are an extremely difficult thing to create. The human face is as dissected a thing as exists for us, and creating one with brushes or The GIMP is far from easy at any skill level.
As such, please let me know if you’d be interested in giving my portrait generator a try. You just feed it individual facial features, whether drawn or from photographs. You have to make the background transparent with alpha transitions to the actual feature, balance the skin tones amongst those of other features, etc., but it makes portrait creation relatively easy and highly varied.
I have some old videos up on my YouTube channel with VERY few base features, but they combine exponentially so the more the merrier. Anyway, let me know and I can show you how to use it properly and prepare facial feature textures for it. It’s a win scenario when manpower is at a premium and Denis Loubet is unavailable.
Unless you are a one yourself, finding an artist for such projects is unfortunately extremly hard.
We were lucky to have UVL’s Nytefall as a 2D artist, but after 7 month of silence there is little I can do and as much as I hope she’ll reappear well… hope is gonna create a game.
We had likewise a 3D artist working on a new Gazer concept, and he vanished without giving any news either.
I can’t even begin to express how many times this happened.
So yeah, I’d certainly be willing to give a look your portraits generator and see if we can come up with good stuff – because unless we have more 2D artists miraculously appearing, the way it goes we’ll have to cut portrait altogether.
Sergorn, that’s something that happens in every project. Motivation tends to disappear after a while for most people. It’s the single biggest challenge that every project faces, and it’s the main reason why so many remakes have died. When recruiting, talent is important, but it is motivation that will take your team to the finish line.
True, though my issue is not much with people losing motivation as it is with people just vanishing without giving any news whatsoever.
That’s just impolite and rude really.
Dropping a “sorry gotta leave the team” mail ain’t exactly a time consuming thing.
Oh well…
Alright, first of all here’s the video. I haven’t made any new facial feature images since then, so the selection is still pretty sparse. I used photographs, but you could make much simpler “cartooney” or artistic features if you liked and they could be combined the same way:
[the usual].youtube.com/watch?v=NR2w0MN-rFU
It’s written in GAMBAS 3, which is still under development but has a release candidate and is very stable. It currently runs under various flavors of Linux and has a Mac OSX port. I’ve put the project files for Avatar on my site as well as the config directory with all the images necessary to run the program:
[circumvent filtering].eightvirtues.com/sanctimonia/software/avatar/
If you don’t mind a small pain to reach a larger objective (assuming you don’t use Linux), you may install VirtualBox and I can give you specific instructions for installing Ubuntu and compiling the latest build of GAMBAS 3. It’s a hell of a lot easier than you think if you don’t already know how to do it.
In your particular case, the one feature I need to add to the program is a “save image” button to write a PNG with transparency for the background. Very easy, so no big deal. I can also add additional layers to the portrait generation in case you want to add things like hats, helmets, facial hair, backgrounds, etc.
Let me know what you think. Perhaps we can create portraits together, as I need WAY more facial features than I currently have.